Ascend Communications
More info
- Creator
- Rob Ryan
- Released
- 1989–1999
- Owner
- Lucent Technologies (from 1999)
- Type
- Networking equipment
The company whose access servers answered a large share of the 1990s' dial-up internet calls.
Rob Ryan founded Ascend in California in 1989. The product that made it was the MAX, a box that answered hundreds of incoming calls from modems and ISDN lines and turned them into IP traffic. For an ISP in the middle of the dial-up boom it replaced racks of individual modems and terminal servers, with users authenticated over RADIUS. The Pipeline line covered the other end: small ISDN routers for offices and homes.
In 1997 Ascend bought Cascade Communications to get into frame relay and ATM. Two years later Ascend itself went to Lucent for roughly $20 billion in stock — right around the time broadband started turning dial-up access servers into scrap.